"The Progress Paradox" Gregg Easterbrook

EnviroEngr

{Forgot to mention in my previous post} that I just finished reading "The Progress Paradox" by Gregg Easterbrook. Mr. Easterbrook believes, for the most part, that peak oilers are Cassandras. The solution to the world's problems is not to roll back the American lifestyle, but rather to export it to the rest of the world!

If his thinking is shared by most of the power-elites in Washington, we are most certainly doomed.

{copied from http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic4043.html }
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EnviroEngr · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 11:20 am Post subject: Review Please

retiredguy,

Could you give us a thumbnail sketch of the book?
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| Whose reality is this anyway!? |
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Repent · Posted: Wed Jan 19, 2005 5:26 pm Post subject: Review

I have also just finished reading "The progress Paradox" by Gregg Easterbrook. I found the book excellent reading for his synopsis of modern day ills. In particular he developed 3 strong assertions in regards to why people feel worse while the economy continues to grow.

1) Choice anixiety- With ever more choices and personal freedom, this creates constant anixiety as one never really knows if they are making the best possible choice. As well as generallized feelings of regret when choices are made.

2) Collapse anixiety- the majority of people feel society can't go on like it has been. That resources will be depleted, growth will stop, incomes will decline, ect. (Its worth noting he doesn't believe in the collapse- by extrapolating and using our past successes and progress as indicative of our future potential)

3) Corruption - Corruption of our modern corporations, the Republican US administration and tyranny in the 3rd world are shown as limiting factors preventing us from exporting our success worldwide.

I found his book compelling, well researched and easy to read. However he seems to have a shallow list of the world problems. Global warming and corruption being the "only real problems" our modern society needs to worry about. This seems a little nieve when problems like long term water and food resources are weighed against currect global population growth (and are dismissed as solveable). Innumerable other problems exist in the world and despite his assertion that "everthing is getting better everywhere" this seems little silly.

For the future he feels we can become happier by becoming socially more active in taking western ideals to the rest of the world. That happiness always comes from within and cannot be bought by any amount of money or wealth. Also in his closing chapter he says:

"No one can say what the future may hold- nuclear war, new dictatorships, horrible errors of genetic engineering, a comet strike, other things that could go badly wrong. But it is not out of the question that someday the suburban utopia sketched...will more or less come to pass: that everyone in the West, perhaps even everyone in every nation, will have access to whatever material things they require without money anxiety, while living very long lives in slender good health with recreation and romance and in a world finally at peace"

A final cop-out saying he has no real suggestions on how the world will progress. None the less entralling reading!

retiredguy · Posted: Sat Jan 22, 2005 12:00 pm Post subject:

Nice synopsis, Repent.

Since I disagreed with his fundamental tenet, that resources are plentiful and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future, I found the book less than compelling.

Also, I found it ironical, that despite the admitted ills he attributes to acquisitive capitalism, he stridently calls for the West to export its lifestyle to the rest of the world. He claims that it not fair for the West to continue to exploit the rest of the world to its own advantage. But his solution is not to put a brake on the West's destructive over-comsuption but to export it to the remainder of the world. What hubris.